The Satanic Verses

modern ideas of mames.’
    ‘And you,’ he came back strongly. ‘Did you, for example, ask their Daddyji’s permission before you threw his kiddies off the roof?’
    She vanished in fury and yellow smoke, with an explosion that made him stagger and knocked the hat off his head (it lay upturned on the pavement at his feet). She unleashed, too, an olfactory effect of such nauseous potency as to make him gag and retch. Emptily: for he was perfectly void of all foodstuffs and liquids, having partaken of no nourishment for many days. Ah, immortality, he thought: ah, noble release from the tyranny of the body. He noticed that there were two individuals watching him curiously, one a violent-looking youth in studs and leather, with a rainbow Mohican haircut and a streak of face-paint lightning zigzagging down his nose, the other a kindly middle-aged woman in a headscarf. Very well then: seize the day. ‘Repent,’ he cried passionately. ‘For I am the Archangel of the Lord.’
    ‘Poor bastard,’ said the Mohican and threw a coin into Farishta’s fallen hat. He walked on; the kindly, twinkling lady, however, leaned confidentially towards Gibreel and passed him a leaflet. ‘You’ll be interested in this.’ He quickly identified it as a racist text demanding the ‘repatriation’ of the country’s black citizenry. She took him, he deduced, for a white angel. So angels were not exempt from such categories, he wonderingly learned.‘Look at it this way,’ the woman was saying, taking his silence for uncertainty – and revealing, by slipping into an over-articulated, over-loud mode of delivery, that she thought him not quite pukka, a Levantine angel, maybe, Cypriot or Greek, in need of her best talking-to-the-afflicted voice. ‘If they came over and filled up wherever you come from, well! You wouldn’t like
that
.’

    Punched in the nose, taunted by phantoms, given alms instead of reverence, and in divers ways shewn the depths to which the denizens of the city had sunk, the intransigence of the evil manifest there, Gibreel became more determined than ever to commence the doing of good, to initiate the great work of rolling back the frontiers of the adversary’s dominion. The atlas in his pocket was his master-plan. He would redeem the city square by square, from Hockley Farm in the north-west corner of the charted area to Chance Wood in the south-east; after which, perhaps, he would celebrate the conclusion of his labours by playing a round of golf at the aptly named course situated at the very edge of the map: Wildernesse.
    And somewhere along the way the adversary himself would be waiting. Shaitan, Iblis, or whatever name he had adopted – and in point of fact that name was on the tip of Gibreel’s tongue – just as the face of the adversary, horned and malevolent, was still somewhat out of focus … well, it would take shape soon enough, and the name would come back, Gibreel was sure of it, for were not his powers growing every day, was he not the one who, restored to his glory, would hurl the adversary down, once more, into the Darkest Deeps? – That name: what was it? Tch-something? Tchu Tché Tchin Tchow. No matter. All in good time.

    But the city in its corruption refused to submit to the dominion of the cartographers, changing shape at will and without warning, making it impossible for Gibreel to approach his quest in thesystematic manner he would have preferred. Some days he would turn a corner at the end of a grand colonnade built of human flesh and covered in skin that bled when scratched, and find himself in an uncharted wasteland, at whose distant rim he could see tall familiar buildings, Wren’s dome, the high metallic spark-plug of the Telecom Tower, crumbling in the wind like sandcastles. He would stumble across bewildering and anonymous parks and emerge into the crowded streets of the West End, upon which, to the consternation of the motorists, acid had begun to drip from the sky, burning great holes in the surfaces of the roads. In this pandemonium of mirages he often heard laughter: the city was mocking his impotence, awaiting his surrender, his recognition that what existed here was beyond his powers to comprehend, let alone to change. He shouted curses at his still-faceless adversary, pleaded with the Deity for a further sign, feared that his energies might, in truth, never be equal to the task. In brief, he was becoming the most wretched and bedraggled of archangels, his garments